Day: August 5, 2017

Six of the team were present for Saturday’s working session so a lot was achieved but not until grabbing the chance for a group photo! [Your blogger was unfortunately not there due to family commitments].

LCP
Work continues on completing the painting of the LCP cabin’s rear wall. Holes were reamed and re tapped for the roof catches and primer applied to the places were using the paint roller is not practical.

T86
The majority of work is now focused on the T86 with several tasks being undertaken.

De rusting and priming the wheel arches inside the T86 cabin. The original flooring was removed some time ago as it was completely rotten due to water ingress and fortunately the steel sections of flooring had not corroded through, namely the wheel arches. Here you can see the stripped floor and the primed wheel arches.

And here the floor is being refurbished.

Removing as many of the external fittings to the cabin as possible, as there is usually corrosion underneath them, specifically the reflectors (seen below). Not an easy task so an impact driver was required to remove the corroded in self tappers.

Rubbing down the end wall of the cabin. Unlike the LCP the T86 cabin is in much better condition paint wise so no going back to bare metal much to everyone’s relief – especially those working on it (live action below!).

Simulator

The simulator was run up for its usual weekly check for us to discover it has a fault. It boots to the initial Bloodhound display screens the console lights flash (usual start up sequencing) but not all together as they should and the simulator then freezes. No time on Saturday to pursue the fault but the suspicion is a missing input to the Digital Input box so the Argus hangs waiting for it ……… we think!

Off Site – Pedestal Gear Box Refurbishment
Refurbishing the Pedestal Gear box so the pedestal can be lowered. The gearbox has been dismantled and bearings removed, the majority of which are U/S due to corrosion again caused by water ingress. Here are the bearings being removed using a puller.

And here are the culprits:

The bearings are imperial sizes but fortunately still available so a new set has been ordered.

Off Site – Test Rig Development for I/O Cards
The test rig for checking Digital Output cards is progressing well using an Arduino to set the required addressing and data required to test the card. The digital outputs are now controllable so the next stage is to attach LED’s to the switched outputs that correspond to the LED indications on the front of the card. The test rig which is the basis for eventually testing all I/O cards for the LCP MK2 consists of:

Laptop for programming the Arduino and displaying waveforms/logic levels from a PicoScope (an excellent bit of kit).

An Arduino

A locally designed Serial PeriBus generator which has six lines that connect to the I/O box with a 20 way ribbon cable

A salvaged Digital Output box to replicate the Digital I/O box in use in the LCP. The Digital I/O box containing a serial to parallel PeriBus converter card , a parallel PeriBus Termination card and the Digital I/O card under test.

Here is the rig in its development stage of build driving a Digital I/O card.